ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the features of the Chilean, Peruvian, and Mexican education systems that contribute to decisions about how much of children's time should be invested in schools as opposed to paid or unpaid work. The ideals that are reflected in each nation's legal and institutional responsibility for education, as the desired alternative to child labor, have been given added legitimacy in recent years by world campaigns that articulate both welfarist and human-rights orientations to compulsory schooling. The administrative centralism of Peruvian public education stands in sharp contrast with Chilean decentralization. Attendance continued to rise and fall in response to student demand but without any concomitant financial support for schools based on their enrollments. By comparison with many other decentralization reforms attempted in Latin America, the Mexican reform maintains far greater control by the central government. Mexico's reforms in the 1990s had a more ambitious goal than merely to extend obligatory schooling for three more years to the secondary level.
